Community: Birds of a Feather

Last night I found myself once again in the lobby of the Latino Theatre Company on Spring Street in downtown LA. Colorful lights raked the marble walls of the Beaux Arts bank turned theatrical venue. I was greeted by enthusiastic young people dressed in black at the front door, and within minutes, I started to see familiar and friendly faces enter the lobby. One of my former colleague, Kalief Washington, with his sister Amani, a painter, I learned, first joined me. They were there to see Oliver Mayer’s play, Ghost Waltz, in Theatre 2. Having seen Oliver’s play several weeks ago, I was there to see Boni B. Alvarez’s play, Mix-Mix: The Filipino Adventures of a German Jewish Boy. This production was a co-pro with Playwright’s Arena, and directed by long time Artistic Director Jon Lawrence Rivera in Theatre 3, the theatre down the main stairs near the vault door.

Over the course of the half hour before the show, many of Los Angeles Theatre’s luminaries populated the lobby. Playwright and sage Luis Alfaro, playwrights Joseph D. Valdez, and Marilyn Schotland, director extraordinaire Jessica Kubzansky, director and actor Bob Bailey, artistic director Jose Luis Valenzuela, scenic designer Tom Buderwitz and many others milled around the lobby with the three theatres’ doors swung open like welcoming arms to receive their excited audiences. It was very much of a community feeling and one that harkened back to the 80s when so many of us worked there on projects. It is no small feat to run a theatre complex of that size and fill the theatres with the community.

The Lobby at LATC has so much history and many memories for me. I took a pano shot of the lobby, currently graced with superhuman sized puppets and sent it to my friend and former ASM for the production of Bogeyman, written and directed by Reza Abdoh. She was so more than that but I think that may have been her credit on that project. She did every Reza show and is credited on his web site along with Adam Soch for keeping Reza’s legacy alive. They produced a beautiful documentary about Reza and videos of almost all his shows are available on the website above. The center picture below depicts our crew and designers for the production, in the cornfield on the center of Timian Alsaker’s insane set, each holding a few dollars. I don’t remember what that meant, but at the time, LATC was suffering extreme financial hardship. Perhaps we were saying we’d continue to work for $2.00 because we were having such a good time. An intentional community whose precision of artistic choices created amazing theatrical experiences.

Boni’s play is nothing short of epic. I described it that way in the parking lot to Luis and Joseph and Marilyn whom we saw as we were leaving, and in retrospect, I think they may feel I was in some way disparaging the play. Not in the least. It is a complex story beautifully told. From the dramaturg’s note in the program (Arnab Banerji):

Boni A. Alvarez elaborates on an extraordinary “local” event from the Philippines during the war years. There is [sic] the relocations of the German Jewish refugees to the South East Asian nation. Manuel Quezon, the first president of the Commonwealth of Philippines, instituted an Open Door Policy with American assistance that would have allowed some 100,000 German Jews asylum in the Philippines. American intervention, however, ensured that only 10,000 people were actually admitted into the country.

One of the main characters in Mix-Mix is based on one such transplant to the Philippines, Ralph Preiss. Alvarez has set himself a difficult task, placing the 2024 audience in a culturally confusing historical environment. Rivera, with a strong team of designers, creates a malleable multi-leveled staging area full of surprising spaces on which to create the scenes and flashbacks which convey the complexity and danger of the recent immigrants to Manila as they attempt to flee Japanese invaders. Out of the frying pan…The scenic design by Christopher Scott Murillo was effective, supported by simple but effective props and projections by Nicholas Santiago. The costumes (Mylette Nora) were versatile, meeting the huge demands of the script and the quick changes required for the story. I found the evening fascinating and ultimately satisfying. There were some excellent individual performances – Casey J. Adler as Ralph, McClain Wilson as Mark, and Myra Cris as Ocenar. There were theatrical movement moments throughout the play that served to unify the ensemble in a powerful way which supported the story. I’m glad I went. It plays through June 16th and you can get tickets here.

This morning, after a production meeting was cancelled, I was able to attend the bird watching event at the LA County Museum of Art that I’d signed up for. It began at 8:30 in the first day of June gloom here in LA, and it was an eclectic group of neighbors from the LACMA vicinity and others like myself, from further away. We stood in a circle around on the plaza, meeting the organizers of the walk, the Painted Feather Bird Club, received our binoculars and a “Cool Birds of LA” flier with birds many of whom I haven’t seen but will definitely be looking for. While we were still standing in the plaza, one of the group, a more experienced birder named Chris, spotted a tiny (to the eye) dot at the top of a huge office building near LACMA. We all turned as a group, trying first with our eyes to locate what he had spotted, then with our binoculars. The wee spot turned out to be the first of four Peregrine falcons we saw in the immediate vicinity of LACMA and the La Brea Tar Pits. Benny, who also leads birding tours, set up his scope so that we could all see the raptor up close. I must say the falcon was very accommodating to stay so still for so long as there were 30 of us. Here’s a brief BBC clip I found about how the peregrine falcon hunts and their aerodynamic design. I took a pano of the group looking at a grove of native flora that proved to be a haven for hummingbirds, and some dark eyed juncos.

The bird watch probably covered about a mile hiking from place to place in the park around LACMA and The La Brea Tar Pits. At one point, we were looking and listening to some bird calls across the main tar pit and our group walked around to the Wilshire side of the tar pit because Benny had determined (by the bird calls) there might be a hooded oriole in the syamore and palm trees there. We all stood, necks craning up for a good ten minutes. I wasn’t the only one who had trouble locating the extremely chatty bird. Finally I found it, not bright like the picture above, but a dingy olive color (probably a result of the lighting conditions). Throughout the walk, Benny and Carlton shared tidbits about the native flora of Los Angeles and the types of birds and animals that once populated Los Angeles.

A different type of community than the , but as we circled up back at the plaza, two hours had flown by.

The rest of Saturday included lunch with a friend at the Urth Caffe, followed by a matinee performance of Jelly’s Last Jam, which opens tomorrow. They are in great shape. The show was stunning, with scenic design by Edward E. Haynes, Jr., Lighting Design by Rui Rita, Costumes by Samantha C. Jones and Sound Design by Danny Erdberg & Ursula Kwong Brown. Performances were stunning. The penultimate preview house was full and the response was very enthusiastic. Opens tomorrow and plays through June 23. You can get tickets here.

Plenty of community this week!